The Emotional Algebra of Anais Nin

One of the privileges of the teaching life is the paid vacation. The torrential rains in Bombay add great value to life only if you do not have to go out into the ‘mean streets’.

Among other things, today I was browsing through some of Anais Nin’s writings and as always, I am endlessly fascinated with her, perhaps more as a bewitching woman than a writer. Her biographer gives her the epithet of being “a major minor writer”. I am not so worried about her position in literature but some of her insights into life cut like knife. I would like to share some of these.

Anais Nin became well-known particularly after Philip Kaufman’s film Henry and June, on her simultaneous bisexual affair with Henry Miller and his wife June Miller. Those who have seen the film have been captivated by the film’s erotic power (one of the most hauntingly sensuous films ever made) often without any awareness of her writing. Philip Kaufman did a workshop at my film school with this film when I was a student and so I have a special kind of relationship with the film.

To mention Anais Nin as the finest writer of female erotica is to trivialize her work. Besides, I have a problem with the word ‘female’ as applied to her work. For a quick overview, Anais Nin (1903-1977) was a French writer born of Cuban parents both of whom were classical musicians. Her great-grandfather ran away from Paris to Havana at the time of the French Revolution and she, in her lifetime, ran away from Paris to NYC during WWII. In the prime of her youth, not only was her libido the most active, she was also the toast of the entire Parisian art world. Nin was the lover of many leading literary/art figures including Henry Miller, Antonin Artaud, Edmund Wilson, Gore Vidal, James Agee and Lawrence Durrell, Otto Rank (psychoanalyst, Freud’s famous student), Gonzalo More (a firebrand Peruvian communist revolutionary) among others (C.G. Jung?). [The beautiful, expert ‘Madame’ in Buñuel’s Belle de jour is called Madame Anaís as an allusion to Nin.] Henry Miller took entire pages out of her diaries and incorporated them en toto into his novel Tropic of Capricorn. She let him do it out of sheer love. As she wrote somewhere: “…(I am) capable of every audacity in life but vulnerable in love.”

Her nine novels are actually pale shadows of an outrageously reckless and bizarre life (except Winter of Artifice, 1939, and the lesbian novel The Voice, which are my personal favourites). Her legacy to literature was her 69(hmm!)-volume diaries which explore every goose bump and furrow of one woman’s sexual consciousness. She spoke of her diaries as her shadow, her double. “I will only marry my double”, she wrote in one of her autobiographical novels.

And yet, as I mentioned earlier, I have some issues with the notion of ‘female’ erotica à la Nin. One French philosopher recently said that the male gaze was deeply planted within her notion of the ‘female’. Consider this, her most titillating triumphant declaration:

“… My recipe for perfect happiness – mix well the sperm of four men in one day … I walk joyously away, debtless, independent, uncaptured…”

Elsewhere in her Diaries, she writes:

“…I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don’t mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding."

Even as you try to pass judgment on her moral ambivalence, she would reply with this:

“… We have created false dichotomies; we create false ambivalences and very painful ones sometimes - the feeling that we have to choose. But I think at one point we finally realize, sometimes subconsciously, whether or not we are really fitted for what we try and if it's what we want to do. …”


Since this is far from being an academic blogpost, I just wanted to make a few casual comments on re-reading Anais Nin but I want to leave the reader here with some flashes of her insights into life. I adore the passion with which she lived her life and the beautiful poetry inherent in them. They really sound like “quotable quotes” one could memorise and use on the right occasion or inscribe it inside a card for a friend who is lost in life’s dark alleys (like most of us):

o Living never tires one out as much as the effort not to live. And if one lived deeply, one also rested deeply. …People living deeply have no fear of death.
o I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
o Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.
o Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
o We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
o We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
o We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.
o There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.
o I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
o Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
o I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ''idea of them.
o Man can never know the loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in the woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. Woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which she is bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love a taking of man within her, an act of birth and rebirth, of child rearing and man bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to BE. But for woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment man rests inside of her.
o Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
o Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.
o Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
o If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.
o There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.
o The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.
o The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
o Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.

As Time Goes By

One of the many things that I find charming about Latin American social life is how people remember little details about you even when you have forgotten them. It never ceases to surprise me.

I often enjoy the company of kids far more than that of adults. So when this extremely sweet girl - with cheeks so red you would think they have been painted – slowed down her bicycle and started talking as I was walking from one building to another, I couldn’t help extending the casual conversation. What I didn’t know was that she would touch me in a special way!

Her name is Estafani (Latin version of the Anglican Stephanie), six years old. She told me about her mother who is in Mexico City and her dad who is in Italy and she lives with her grandma on the film school campus. She must be feeling terribly lonely here and I start feeling sad for her but she wasn’t sad at all. She strikes up conversations with students and teachers everywhere and all of them seem to love her. I was missing my own son very much and so spending time with her was a kind of emotional substitute as well as a way of refreshing myself with her beautiful innocence.

In the evening, I found her playing with her grandma close to my apartment and I realized that she is the granddaughter of someone I know for many years. The kid’s grandma, who is now in her late 70s, remembers clearly till this date that I had taken a photo of her ballerina daughter (Estafani’s mom) twenty years ago in the swimming pool and had sent it back to my family in Calcutta as a (biased) sample of how Cuban girls look like and everybody had gone gaga over it. So it was a pleasant surprise that this little girl is the daughter of someone I know. What does her mom do now?

The ballerina mother continues with her career in dance but as the trapeze dancer in a circus in Mexico. How time passes! The grandma is visibly proud of her daughter and granddaughter.
“Her mom is as beautiful as she was 20 years ago and this kid is an image of her mom, isn’t she? She is so friendly that she can strike a conversation with anyone and so intelligent that she asked me, ‘Can you imagine what it feels like when the president of a nation is thrown out of his own country?’ ”

She was referring to the incidents following the military coup in Honduras which has shaken the whole of Latin America for the sheer barbarity of the act. The Miami news channels are playing hourly updates on it. But I am more interested in the story of the mother. How does a beautiful ballerina dancing to Bizet’s Carmen become a trapeze dancer in a circus? It confuses me because in my mind, ballet belongs to high culture and circus belongs to the other extreme in the hierarchy of cultural forms of entertainment. This can only happen in Latin America!

I also suddenly remember something and that fascinates me further. I had indeed seen a circus playing while in Monterrey in Mexico two years ago and someone said that the circus is of a very high standard, specially the dancers. I wanted to visit it though it was very expensive but my friends discouraged me firstly because there was no time that I could take out of the conference to go to a circus and more importantly, they all thought I must grow out of my childhood fantasies.

Estefani’s mom had married an Italian and migrated to some Italian city and the child was born out of that marriage. She subsequently divorced the guy and married a Mexican businessman and migrated to Mexico, travelling with the circus while leaving the daughter back in Havana with the grandma. The mom calls the kid every few days just as much as the dad calls from Italy.


Catching up with people after so many years is like following the characters of a novel and seeing in a few moments of storytelling, what Time does to people. Divorces and separations are rarely seen as tragedies in this part of the world. When women tell these stories, they sound more like stories of liberation and triumph. Many years ago I had seen this septagenerian grandma getting married on the campus for the fourth time in her life at the age of 50 or so. It was a hugely memorable event with Gabo (ie, Gabriel García Marquez) playing her godfather and Fernando Birri (the ‘pope’ of Latin American cinema) as the priest substitute. I overheard her boss, a woman, saying, ‘At last she has found the great love of her life’. As I followed the atheist rituals of the event with wide-eyed wonderment, it felt like a thrilling tragi-comic idea to find the great love of your life at the age of fifty.

So now I ask her what happened to that man.
‘I got rid of him’, she said. ‘He migrated’.
No more men in your life after that?
‘No. Enough with men. Now I have my granddaughter. I live for her’.

I didn’t realise that the kid thought I was a native Indian from some part of Latin America.
‘But you don’t look like that. You dress differently.’

I explain to her about the silly mistake that Christopher Columbus made five hundred years ago, leaving all of us confused about ‘Indians’. He wanted to find us (India) but instead took the opposite direction and ended up finding you’ll (Latin America) and the guy didn’t even realise his mistake. He started calling them ‘Indians’ and that continues to this day!

‘Five hundred years ago?’, the girl murmured to herself in amazement.

Actually, more than that.

‘My friends also create so many confusions in class.’

She takes me to show something in the garden – the design of the shrubs. I am enjoying being with her but some people call me to a van which is waiting for me to get in. I have to tear myself away from her.

The next day, I go to the office of the director in search of some documents I need to sign and there was the grandma there who works as the director’s secretary even at her age. Suddenly the sweet little girl comes out of the door and hugs me intensely as if I am her father. I almost reciprocate the emotion but I have to hold myself back with a sense of adult guilt. It is not a good idea to develop emotional bonds with kids when you know you are going to leave within a few days/weeks. For me she is just a substitute for my own kid and for her, I am just a substitute for her father whom she must be missing deeply.

Adulthood has also taught me that loving anyone involves certain consequences, certain responsibilities that we must be ready to embrace, and embrace them with joy but what do we do when what we stand to lose is far more than what we gain?

On the final day of my stay in Cuba, I ask Estefani to speak to the camera while I record her standing at the landing of the staircase. She tells me, ‘Mom said yesterday she is coming to Havana in December and will stay here for the next two years. Why don’t you stay back till December? Then, you will get to see her’.

Going Away

The best part of travel is its anticipation.

For me, it has never been like this. I am used to getting phone calls in the middle of the night asking me if I can go over to Rio de Janeiro ‘in the coming week’. The ticket would arrive on the day of travel and I would make an international trip without insurance. That’s one of the scariest aspects considering my conviction that one day, sooner or later, I will die in a plane crash. In situations such as these, there is no room for anticipation because there is no time to nurture that emotion. Instead, there is a high anticipation of the trip being cancelled. And when travelling from India to countries such as Mexico, the visa nightmares leave place for neither romance nor anticipation, far less the anticipation of romance. The Mexican government somehow thinks that there are no honest travellers among Indians; all we want in life is to cross over to the US through the land border. My visa was sorted out at the last moment through some hobnobbing at the highest diplomatic level and once again, the passport had reached on the day of travel.

Not this time. Everything has been sorted out well ahead. The ticket reached two months prior to travel and even the last visa as well as the insurance were all done a fortnight ago. I even completed the purchase of 35 gift items for friends ten days before and even finished cataloging them (ie, which gift is for whom). For the first time in my life, I truly relish the romantic joy of the anticipation of a thrilling five-week travel schedule with all expenses paid except for my personal side-trips in Europe. All meetings, rendezvous, all lecture assignments, dinners, hotel reservations, encounters with old friends at airport lounges in cities-I-barely-know, all are fixed way ahead in time. It is as if I have scripted my own life with me as the protagonist, belligerently defying any potential unsettling uncertainty. I neatly print out the details of my itinerary, make multiple copies of it and distribute them among those who may have to contact me in case of emergency. And yet, two days before my travel, a Spanish friend informs that there is no way she can take the same flight with me from Madrid to Santiago de Compostela where we reserved a cheap ‘no-cancellation-allowed’ SpanAir ticket eight weeks ago. Even before I embark upon my journey, I see my eighty euros floating down the drain along with my misplaced enthusiasm. To what extent can real life be scripted? What’s the point in being so proactive! Isn’t it better to live impulsively and allow life to take you unawares!

Anuradha (my ex-wife) and Shagnik (my 8-year old son) come to drop me at the airport in the middle of the night. She had never seen me off at the airport during all the years we were married and yet she is here tonight. Neither she nor my son are visibly concerned about me going away but far more absorbed by the romantic atmosphere of the departure lounge of the international airport. I almost drift away, unnoticed. They are busy looking up at the itineraries of airlines as much as I am. There are no finer journeys than the ones provoked in the imagination.

When will you take me to Europe? My son asks me, by way of bidding farewell. When will you take me to Paris, Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona? - places he has heard being mentioned passionately at home and now sees some of these names in the itinerary chart glaring in front of him. He learns the names of some new destinations - Newark, Amsterdam, Johannesburg – words that evoke a sense of romance about adventures that await him. The travel bug his hit him too.

‘Study well and you will get to travel to these places and many more’, I tell him by way of consolation as well as inspiration like a middle-class educated Bong for whom giving lectures, attending conferences or film festivals, fellowships or scholarships are flimsy justifications for travelling around the world at someone else’s cost. At least, it is the easiest way to trot the globe.